C++ difference between ** and *& in parameter passing

Question

I have implemented operations on a list, one of them is add, and since i don\'t want to return anything, i read that i had to use **, and it works, but i saw on another plac

Answer 1

The first (**) is a pointer to a pointer and the second (*&) is a reference to a pointer.

A reference and a pointer are conceptually quite similar. But there are some important differences, for example:

• A reference cannot be NULL (but it can refer to a pointer which points to NULL).
• You can't modify a reference to refer to something else.
• You need to dereference a pointer to access the value.

See this related question for more differences:

• Difference between pointer variable and reference variable in C++